Beekeeper uses 'tough love'

Beekeeper uses 'tough love', ºOfficers went door to door during Monday search., ÂºSurvival of fittest method used to build hives.

March 02, 2011|ROSEMARY PARKER | Kalamazoo Gazette

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Provided only a box with a hole in it to call home, each of Marr's backyard hives will sink or swim of its own accord, and Marr will write about their fate in a blog for the magazine Mother Earth News.

Marr had helped his father tend bees growing up in Decatur, and wanted to set up bee hives when, after college, he and his wife bought a small parcel of land.

"I couldn't really afford to get into (beekeeping) by buying things from a supplier, so I started by offering to collect swarms and hives for people," as a service, when bees moved in to places people didn't want them to be, he said.

"I had five hives to fill, and I got 50 calls the first year. I got calls for every kind of bug, but 30 to 40 of them were honeybees."

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Marr said he took in as many bees as he could, found homes for others among his beekeeping acquaintances, and set about learning how to manage his hives with a minimum of intervention.

It's not only that he couldn't afford to buy bees or their costly feed supplements or medical treatments.

Marr figured that his freebie bees had managed to survive on their own in the walls of houses or hollow trees, so they must be doing something right to stay alive.

His job is to bring them together with other survivors, then stay out of their way and let them continue to do what they are doing.

Marr said he found support for his approach online -- a beekeeper in Nebraska who recommends building a strong and diverse gene pool with wild bees instead of commercially bred mail-order shipments; minimizing pesticide exposure by locating the hives far away from cultivated farm fields; avoiding antibiotic and other chemical treatments to fight bee parasites and diseases, instead relying on beneficial fungi, bacteria and other components of a healthy hive system; and then raising queens and new bees from those bees that survive the first year.

Part of that system is tough on him, too. With no removable foundation trays that make honey easy to extract from the hive, Marr uses a labor intensive crush-and-strain method that modern beekeeping abandoned decades ago.

Marr has been beekeeping that way on a small scale for nearly three years, and so far with fairly promising results.

A few hives were lost to marauding field mice, and one starved over the winter.

But Marr and his friends have managed to keep 25 hives alive, with more to come this summer with the outyard project.

Through an Internet fundraising site, backers have pledged more than his original $3,500 goal -- money he will use for basic equipment and hive boxes.

Any extra money will go toward more bees and more hives, he said.

Marr said he hopes his methods will be sustainable. It's too soon to tell whether his naturally strong bees will resist Colony Collapse Disorder.

"I don't think this is a catch-all cure for (CCD)," Marr said. "But it's a more appealing way for me. I'd rather let it work itself out.

"I will lose hives -- but if I do, I'm undaunted, I'll start up again and keep going."